Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro Review

Plug-and-play consoles are a great idea on paper: a quick, portable means of playing games right out of the box with almost no other accessories or game cartridges required.  Unfortunately, be it due to the limited technology of their time or just plain laziness, a lot of plug and play consoles aren’t that great.  Over the years the most common ones I’ve seen are the basic Atari and retro arcade games like Pac Man with the occasional Double Dragon or original Mortal Kombat.

The NES and SNES Classic systems caused a bit of a resurgence in retro plug-and-play consoles. After how much demand they got, I started seeing more of the retro Sega Genesis and Atari plug-and-play consoles as well as the PS1 Classic on store shelves.

The Super Nintendo Classic was the only one to catch my interest, but it wasn’t enticing enough to join the rabid fans in hunting one of them down, especially when I already had, or could easily get, the games on it off the WiiU eShop or other ports.  You’d have to put KOF on your retro game system to get me to want it.

Wuzzat.

Years later, while shopping for a computer part to put the finishing touches on a PC to play bigger games, I came across the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro and based on the box the thing was practically made for me in more ways than one.  That it flew under my radar for the better part of a year is a travesty because it is quite a piece of hardware.

Being a retro plug-and-play console, the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro is a hefty white arcade stick with the traditional Neogeo A,B,C, and D buttons to emulate the feeling of a Neogeo cabinet along with an extra 4 buttons for good measure.  Simply plug in the HDMI cable to a TV, connect the stick to a USB power port and after you plug, you play.  I was a little miffed at the requirement to have a separate power source instead of a battery, but after seeing people’s PSP batteries swell up to three times their size, maybe that was for the best.  I don’t think it would have killed them to include an outlet plug for it though.

The Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro comes with a solid 20 games to start with, but over the course of several months SNK released 20 more games that can be unlocked through a function of the USB drive, making for a much more impressive 40 game lineup that the SNES Classic sure as hell can’t boast.

More than half of the games included are fighting games, with a few other genres and interesting oddities thrown in for some variety. The fighting games include most of the Fatal Fury games (including Mark of the Wolves), the Savage Reign and Last Blade duologies, all the Samurai Shodown Neogeo games except the original version of 5, all the World Heroes games and, my favorites, KOF 97-2002 except for 2001 because everyone except me seems to hate that game.  It also has KOF 95, but everyone except me seems to like that game.

Non-fighting games that were unlocked later include Metal Slug 1-5, the Shock Trooper games and little time wasters like League Bowling, Super Sidekicks (a soccer game) and a very unique first person adventure game called The Super Spy.  There’s enough high-quality games included to be a solid bundle while the archaic ones that are less fun to play are at least an interesting look at the company’s history.  Considering the general price of getting the games on digital storefronts range from $4-10, 40 of them is one hell of a deal and the four save state slots for every game sweetens that deal a little more.  I already had a lot of the games included on the stick in different forms, but having them all in one convenient place is pretty nice and the emulation sure as hell beats Dotemu’s garbage.

All the games run excellently. The sound, movement and upscaled graphics are all the best they could be, as are the controls.  At times everything is so high-quality that it feels like an HD remaster of a sort.  There's no fuzziness in the sound, no tearing in the graphics and no input delay.

The arcade stick itself is very well built to complement the high-speed gameplay.  It is not a cheap piece of plastic even though the coloring almost makes it look like an overpriced Fisher Price toy.  It’s a hefty device with all the parts and design of the cabinet component it’s replicating complete with clicking joystick that people online seem to treat like an impromptu noisemaker.  To give an idea of just how well it controls, I beat Krizalid on the first try on it.  That never once happened on my Gamecube or PS3 controller.  The line “it’s just like at the arcade!” probably sounds like it belongs in an overexcited magazine advert’s speech bubble, but the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro really does control just like a rig you would see at the arcade, minus the buttons jamming after years of use and poor maintenance.

It’s clear a lot of effort was put into the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro's hardware and those wanting to play 40 fun arcade games will definitely be getting their money's worth and then some, but what's built around all the top-quality games have a few noticeable problems that seem to be the result of what I can only surmise to be either laziness or corner-cutting.

The most notable issue is that every game is in Japanese by default, even if they’re games that have English versions.  For some of the games, like the KOF games, Fatal Fury 3 and The Last Blade, the English setting is an option in the game’s settings menu, but there are also quite a number of games that don’t have that option.  The Fatal Fury games before 3, KOF 95, League Bowling, Shock Troopers, the first Samurai Shodown and The Super Spy, for example.  For The Super Spy that’s a noticeable problem because NPCs in the game explain things to you that would be very helpful to know and if you can’t understand what they’re saying, it takes out a large part of the game.  Then again, from what I understand the English version is so badly translated it’d almost make no difference.

The small Japanese text can say a lot more.

The lack of an English option can be a non-issue for some of them.  The Metal Slug series excels at telling a story without words, all the basic text in Soccer Brawl is in English anyway and League Bowling only has a few tiny options for a menu, but it’s harder to get invested in some of the games with dialogue when you don’t know what’s going on.  It’s obvious that all SNK did for the stick’s English release was change the language of the base menus.  Some people might take an interest in playing the Japanese versions of games where they couldn’t select it as a language in English releases, but for me it’s disappointing.

Also a tad disappointing are the visual filter options. I do personally like its optional pixel smoothing.  It makes the games look sharper and like they’re hand-drawn, as opposed to the Code Mystics ports that just have a screen blurring option.  That said, those who want traditional pixel scaling only have one option.  For whatever reason the scanline options turn on the pixel smoothing even though they’re supposed to recreate the retro look of older screens from before pixel smoothing existed.  How they thought that was a good idea is beyond me. Fans of scanlines, beware.

The fact that the games are all the AES home console versions can also lead to some frustration at points.  On these versions you’re only given 4 credits to play with and you can’t give yourself infinite credits like at a free play arcade.  This isn’t always so bad.  Games like the KOF and Metal Slug titles save your progress and let you continue from the last level you completed with all your credits, but for the older games, Shock Troopers or Metal Slug 3’s marathon of a final level, get ready to abuse the hell out of those save state slots.

There’s no immediate multiplayer to get some help on that Metal Slug stormfront either.  Owners of the Neogeo Mini or someone with their own Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro can play with owners of the Arcade Stick Pro, but any other controllers are incompatible, presumably because the games don’t have customizable controls to make them work with non-Neogeo hardware.  I personally play through the single player content of the games anyway, but that seems like a serious oversight.

The little Neogeo Mini control pads work too.

As a plug-and-play retro game system, it’s overall a great package, even if SNK did drop the ball in a few areas.  However, that is only half the value.  One of the other things that caught my eye is that the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro is a two-for-one deal. It not only functions as its own plug-and-play console, but as its own arcade stick controller as well.

I was playing with the idea of getting my own arcade stick for my fighting games, but they cost a premium. Some of the best sticks cost $200 and even the smallest mini-travel sticks can cost $50-70.  I got a special pack for the Neogeo Arcade Stick Pro that came with a 10 foot HDMI cable and an adapter called the Gamelinq that allows it to be used with the PS3, PS4 and Switch in addition to its innate PC compatibility. In total it came to about $170, meaning it is not only cheaper than the big arcade sticks, but has more to offer with the built in games (a total value of about $120 if they were all generously on sale for $3 each on digital stores) and the added versatility of the Gamelinq that lets it double as a multifunctional controller, which also cost a ton of money on their own.

Unlike playing off the stick itself, using it as a controller doesn’t require a power supply.  You simply switch it to controller mode and plug it into the system using a USB cord contained in a hollow compartment on the bottom, with the Gamelinq where applicable. There are three different controller modes that change the button settings to work correctly for the different systems. The instructions are pretty vague about it, but it’s easy to figure out.  Perplexingly, one of the modes makes a computer recognize it as an Xbox 360 controller, but it's incompatible with the 360 itself.

There’s also a turbo button that rapidly hits a button for you when you hold one down in controller mode, but that’s situational and doesn’t apply to most fighting games unless you really like unga bunga Vulcan Punch Ralf play or want to cheat at Mortal Kombat's Test your Might challenges.

As a controller, it works just as well as it does for its NeoGeo games. It’s responsive and has the right amount of feedback. I don’t want to go back to normal controllers in Guilty Gear Xrd or KOF 13 after using it.  Before the pandemic I liked to play KOF 13 at the local arcade so I can confidently say that using the Arcade Stick Pro for it feels just as good as it does there.  The fact that it hasn’t broken or worn down after a month or two of playing some of the most hardcore fighting games around speaks to how solidly it’s built, but if something did break, the parts seem to be easy to replace and customize, with all the buttons wired and detachable instead of sautered.  The instructions even have a diagram on how to unscrew and replace the ball top of the stick without having to take the whole thing apart and it comes with a Neogeo logo sticker, meaning SNK encourages the kind of modifying people do to their arcade sticks to make it their own.  Maybe I’ll make those kinds of adjustments someday, but I’m happy with my NeoGeo Arcade Stick Pro as it is.  With a large and substantial library of well-emulated, upscaled games and a well-built controller to boot, it should not be missed and NeoGeo fans will especially get a lot out of it if they don’t have an arcade stick already.  I give the NeoGeo Arcade Stick Pro an 8 out of 10.